this is the cardigan I mentioned last week. I'm including it for continuity, but don't have anything to say about it, so moving on...

I was in several LYS weekend before last because of the Rose City Yarn Crawl. I hadn't intended to participate at all, but my will is weak. While there I asked around for Knitted Wit Falkland Superwash-- Knitted Wit is a very local dyer who I had the pleasure of meeting last summer, and her stuff has popped up all over town in the last few months... but it's all her merino bases. Twisted, which was where I had first acquired Falkland Sport, is still the only store carrying that base, and they had it on sale because they won't be carrying it anymore.

I bought what they had in a fugue state.

This is a colorway that I'm fairly sure I've passed up multiple times before, being very six-year-old-girl pink and purple, but knowing that I may not be able to buy any more, ever, convinced me I was mistaken in thinking I would never knit anything the color of grape bubblicious.

Wednesday I posted pictures of my green serenity socks, which I was planning to send to my aunt in California. I have a small US-shoe-size 7 foot; she wears a size 8. The socks were just this side of big on me, and I figured they'd fit her perfectly.

Then I washed them. In the sink, with wool wash. I'd knit them out of a lovely merino superwash, so I didn't think they'd change much in size. (Before you ask, I didn't swatch, much less wash and block a swatch. These were a spontaneously cast-on comfort-knitting project.) They dried flat over the last couple of days, and today, when I went to put them in an envelope, I realized these stripe-y green socks are not Califonia bound after all.

I had been planning to post today about my green socks, but as you can see, they are not the most appropriate fodder for a work in progress post. They will be heading off to California and my aunt (who needs serenity-giving green socks as desperately as I needed to make them) as soon as I stop sniffling with this head cold.

Choice number two for a work in progress post would be my bubbles hat, seen in the page header... but that's one of those projects that is too easy to be hard but not hard enough to be interesting, nor is it good purse knitting, and as such looks exactly the same as it did several weeks back when I took the above picture.

So, I cast on for a sweater. A green cardigan. And then promptly realized I probably didn't quite have enough yardage. Luckily the fabulous proprietress of Hermosa Fiber Co. is going to help me out by dying a contrasting skein for the button bands, collar, cuffs, and hem... since my colorway is a one-off, I thought that would be the best way to go. In the meantime, I can knit happily for awhile, and maybe next week have more than the cast-edge to show y'all!

It's oddly bright today...

... so here's a stash picture from last year to better indicate how green this green is.

Thanks, as always, go to Tami, of Tami's Amis, for hosting WIP Wednesdays.

I had thought that losing 25 lbs over the past half year would increase the amount that I liked pictures of myself.

Not so much.

Every picture I took of this sweater made me want to go back into the house and stay there. Forever. Alternately, I considered purchasing a burqua. None of this has anything to do with the sweater. The sweater is soft, cuddly, warm; it has depth and texture, and it's comfortable. The arms are a little big, and also a little short-- although I like that, since I usually push up my sleeves-- and there are definitely some wonky areas where my inability to count k2p2 ribbing was front and center-- but I love it. And, unflattering or not, I haven't taken it off in several days.

I am not the only one around here with a new sweater.

Orion is Devin's cat; he's our old man, at about 10 years, and up until 2010 he was an exclusive desert-kitty. And, while he is one of the furriest cats I have ever met, he does seem to be cold here in the Pacific NW.

I figured he could deal with being cold, what with his copious amounts of fur, and ability to crawl under various blankets during the many hours that we're not home and the space heater isn't on (also, I'd like to point out that we do leave the regular heat set at just above 60 all the time, so it's really not that cold). Devin has remained concerned, however, and awhile back she came home with a skein of Malabrigo Rios and asked me to make Orion a sweater. Normally, I'm pretty stridently anti-pet-sweaters, but I really love Devin, and I want her to be happy, and I wanted to try Malabrigo Rios anyway...

I think he's plotting to kill me in my sleep... Especially because there's a video of him moon-walking around the apartment trying to get out of the sweater that I'm going to post as soon as I can figure out how.